The Farm Life of a Swedish Immigrant in Illinois, circa 1900-1925

T H E F A R M L I F E O F A S W E D I S H IMMIGRANT
I N ILLINOIS
C I R C A 1900-1925
E L M E R B . O B E RG
" S k r i v när d u får a r b e t e " (write when you find work) was the
usual final request that any young man heard from his folks as he
would leave his Scandinavian homeland for the United States.
This is what my father, Nels Oberg, heard when in 1890 at the
age of eighteen he left his home in Dalby, Sweden. He was a
healthy young man already used to hard work in the fields.
During my father's first ten years in this country and prior to
his marriage, he worked on various farms in north central I l l i ­nois.
Each fall when the local harvest work slacked off he went
several hundred miles up to the Dakotas to continue field work
there. Notwithstanding his desire to save money in any way he
could, my father d i d not bum a train ride by climbing into an
empty freight or coal car. That method was too dangerous since it
presented the hazard of getting robbed or mugged by other
hitchhikers. Instead, he rode u n d e r a car! He never talked to his
family about these harrowing experiences. At one time, how­ever,
he had confided to a friend that the most frightening part of
any such trip was going over a wide river at night. He must have
been referring to the Mississippi.
Many years later I learned, but not from my father, that with
the aid of a piece of board this fearless Viking somehow an­chored
himself under a car in a half-sitting position with head
bent forward but facing the rear of the train, so that if a foot fell
down it would not necessarily mean a broken leg. The deafen­ing,
grinding noise of the big clumsy wheels, jumping and jolt­ing
at every joint of the rails, and the flying coal soot must have
been unforgettable. A l l the iron horses were fed with coal in
those days.
There was no direct train route between north central Illinois
and the Dakotas, so it would have meant taking several different
trains to make the trip. H ow my father managed to pick the right
trains and get "aboard" at the right time is not easy to imagine.
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Riding as he did, one can be sure Pa could not get on, that is
under, after the train started rolling out of a city freight yard.
How I wish I had asked h im about those daring trips.
In some notes I find that on one occasion during his years as a
farm hand Pa went back to Sweden for a visit and apparently a
high point of the trip was a speech he made in the local grade
school, the only one he ever attended. No doubt he extolled the
virtues of " d e t n y a l a n d e t , " it being a great place to find work.
You can be sure he never dreamed that about seventy years later
one of his own family, a granddaughter, would also go to Sweden
for a school visit, i n her case to attend a summer term at Uppsala
University.
That my father had some problems with English spelling is
quite evident from some of his early expense records. Thus in
1899 when he started out on his own, renting a farm, witness
such entries as:
Other rather well-defined expenses were "toot pulled $1.00,
cut the bull $0.50!"
After renting for seven years he bought a smaller farm north­east
of Neponset (Bureau County), close to where he had been
working when he first came over from Sweden. The house on
this small farm was old and poorly constructed, its porosity
being especially evident in wintertime. It was on this relatively
poor farm that I was born and raised. When Pa bought the
ninety-odd acres, the farm was in very bad shape. There were
many gullies in the fields, the soil was poor, and weeds were the
most abundant crop. About two-thirds of the farm was in timber
and pasture land, beautiful in a sense, but not productive.
My father inherited exceptionally good health, but dear
mother, who had also come from Sweden, passed away at the age
of thirty-five when I was only eight years old. With her passing
only English, or broken English, was spoken in our home. It
might be mentioned that Pa never did master the pronunciation
of the very common pair of English consonants t h . With him it
was always I tink, tank you, dis and dat, dem and dos, nort and
sout, and so fort!
Without a mother, my ten-year-old brother Edwin, my four-turkey
gablor
dussin skrus
caddie whip
boor pig
$2.00 5 turkish
.05 muskiter nets
2.00 skupshuffel
10.00
$10.00
.45
.35
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Nels and Johanna ( B e n g s t o n ) O b e r g and t h e i r c h i l d r e n 1 . t o
r, E d w i n , E l l e n , and E l m e r , 1 9 1 2.
teen-year-old sister E l l e n , and I at eight years, under my father's
strict discipline, carried on as best we could. My father's de­mand
for strict obedience no doubt reflected his upbringing in
Sweden, his father having been a career army man. I recall one
day our country school teacher asked my brother and me, "Why
are you two always so serious?"
My sister dropped out of school to do the necessary work at
home. My brother and I continued going to the one-room
country school about two-and-a-half miles away. One year
only three students attended. Besides the young teacher, there
was another farm boy plus my brother and me. Today there is no
trace of the school; it is all part of a large cornfield.
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In winter our walk to and from the country school was fre­quently
a rather bitter experience. At recess we usually had a
snowball game i f the snow had melted enough to pack well. One
winter recess period I remember well. We were all playing and
running out in the large yard. Suddenly I felt something funny in
my tight fitting cap. Sure enough, a mouse had found a good
place to snooze under the furry ear flapper as my cap had hung in
the cold hallway of the school.
Although the temperature was often low, there were times
when some tempers were not. I recall one young man who
seemed to delight in annoying the teacher. One day as we were
coming in from the recess period, he decided not to get into line
and march into the room with the rest of us. Our teacher lost
control and flung a three-foot stove poker at the boy. Luckily for
all of us no one was hurt. Such an iron poker was used to stir up
the clinkers in the b i g stove.
Later, when I attended high school in town, I was spared some
long cold walks on blizzard-like days by staying in town over­night.
I was able to rent a room which included breakfast, all for
250!
As kids we were somewhat used to being put in place every
now and then. Most of the people of the community were of En­glish
extraction and I guess Swedes were considered to be a m i -
S c o t t ' s S c h o o l , D i s t r i c t N o . 1 5 4 .
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nority. For example, one Sunday morning two well-known local
cattle buyers came to our farm to look at some of my father's
steers. While at our place one of these men noticed a strange boy,
a visiting blond cousin, a few years younger than I, and the man
commented, "Another d a m n Swede." To be sure, it was not too
uncommon for any of us kids to be greeted as a "Swede." This
Sunday morning encounter, however, was the first time that my
classification or k i n d of Swede had been so clearly delineated.
In our whole township there were no more than four or five
Scandinavian families. One such neighboring family moved out
to Iowa, which at that time (1914) was like a new frontier for
many farmers. Apparently hog production was to continue there,
as their little girl wrote to us on a penny postcard early one
spring, "Papa bought a he p i g . " That was all there was on the
card.
It could be inserted here that for one very brief moment in
history there just happened to be a lot of Swedes in our little
town of Neponset. That would have been in 1846 when a group
of Swedish emigrants came via Chicago westward through our
town and on through Kewanee in order to found Bishop H i l l.
The place was named for Biskopskulla, Sweden, birthplace of
Erik Jansson. Bishop H i l l was about fifteen miles south and west
of our farm. This communistic colony or "Utopia on the Prairie,"
as it was called, survived as such for only about fifteen years.
On the lighter side Swedes like most ethnic groups were fre­quently
the butt of many a joke. There was one about a bounty
which was offered by the city of Chicago for finding any Iowa
Swede within its city limits!
As far as other ethnic groups in our home town were con­cerned,
we always had some Belgian neighbors. We worked
with them each harvest, that is, at threshing time. I never
learned much of their language, but I could, even today, curse a
team of horses pretty authentically in Flemish.
That horses do have occasional need for some knowledge of
bilingual language was well demonstrated by an incident in our
barnyard one drowsy summer day. For a brief time that summer
we had a hired man who had just come over from the Old
Country and probably knew not a single word of English. He
would have definitely been labeled a "green Swede." My
brother and I had just helped him hitch up a team of horses to a
wagon in which the newcomer was to drive out to a field. After
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jumping up into the wagon the man gave his strong Swedish
command. The horses did not move a step but perked up their
heads in total bewilderment. Although this happened over three
score years ago, I can still see them standing there with all ears
pointing in unison to the rear as i f to ask, " W h a t was that?" They
were well used to respond to " G i d d o p " and "Whoa," but not
this. Whenever this man d i d get the team on their way it was
probably as much from fright as anything else. Perhaps he would
have had better luck in any involvement with our cows since all
of them d i d have Swedish names!
One more brief incident relating to this non-initiated new­comer
from S v e r i g e comes to mind. At one noon-day dinner my
sister happened to place a glass of jelly on the crowded kitchen
table rather close to this man's plate. He ate the whole tumbler of
jelly himself!
In line with my father's exceptionally thrifty practices, his
general policy was to try to "get along without" whatever it
might be. Waste was unheard of. Our Dutch Cleanser can had
only one hole punched i n it! It was save, save, save, but we did
not have much to save. I doubt any Scotsman was ever more
frugal than my father.
My father d i d not drink or smoke. A nip of whiskey (brännvin)
once in a while in winter was, of course, totally for medicinal
purposes! If anyone gave him a cigar, he would lay it on top of
our wood burning cook stove so that the pleasant aroma could
permeate into the whole house for a day or so. He would never
buy a cigar for himself. On Sundays he gave each of us a penny
for the Sunday school collection plate.
One day my father bought twenty loaves of old, stale white
bread at a small grocery in town for five cents a loaf. We ate it all.
Ice cream he would not eat—too sweet, not good for anyone.
Raw eggs were O.K. He could gulp down one or two with ease.
As a young man, he had worked for a farmer whose meals were
"on the slim side." He would frequently compensate by gulping
down raw eggs out in the barn.
One of Pa's favorite winter dishes was s i l l (herring). It was the
KKKK brand ordered once each year in ten or twenty lb. wooden
pails from Montgomery Ward & Co. in Chicago.
A 250 haircut for any of us was unthought of. Instead, we took
turns cutting each other's hair. The reading glasses my father
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used were purchased at a "100" store in Kewanee, a neighboring
town. In those days such a store really sold items at that price.
As for dress, my father had little variety. In summer it was blue
shirt, straw hat, and tan trousers with suspenders. He never
wore a belt in his lifetime. In the cold of winter he wore a cap
with ear flappers, sweater, Mackinaw coat, leggings, and over­shoes.
Often on the subzero days short icicles would hang from
his mustache! With his stocky build, he always looked like a
farmer—and he was proud of it. Pa was a man of the soil.
Apparently my father was not the only one in our family who
was easily recognized as a "farmer." One summer day I had
some errand at the local stockyards in our small town. I walked
past another boy sitting on the high board stockyard fence. He
was two years my senior and lived in town. He called out to me,
" H i ya, farmer." I was so puzzled as to how he knew I was a
farmer, or how he could appraise my status or occupation so
quickly. I did not realize at the time that wearing a straw hat,
blue shirt, and blue overalls was a complete giveaway.
Our home could scarcely be called a happy one. I do recall,
however, that once in a great while my father would sing a few
lines from " D u g a m l a , d u f r i a " [Thou old, thou free (the Swed­ish
national anthem)]. And we enjoyed hearing the Scandinavian
Bell Ringers when they came to Kewanee. Later we ordered
their records from Wallin's Music Shop in Chicago. Also some­time
in the 1920s we went to Galva to see and hear Olle i
Skratthult and his group. Their entire program was in Swedish.
Another high point for my brother and me was on a summer
Sunday morning i n 1926 seeing and hearing the Crown Prince
and Princess of Sweden at Augustana College in Rock Island
about fifty miles from home. We were impressed by his speaking
in both English and Swedish to about 3,000 people. On the same
afternoon we heard Swedish-born Senator Magnus Johnson of
Minnesota speak at a rally in nearby Moline. We could relate to
him immediately, since a picture of the Senator helping with the
haying operation on his Minnesota farm had just appeared in a
local paper. It raised our spirits since we figured this senator
knew firsthand something about the back-breaking type of work
we sweated over on our farm every summer.
The only place we bought shoes in those days was from Mont­gomery
Wards via their thick annual catalog. In ordering them,
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the main concern was always to order a size that was large
enough so we could wear them out before we outgrew them. My
father's shoes had such a spread that it was really difficult for
him to negotiate the three little floor pedals in our 1920 Ford
touring car.
In line with our policy of wasting nothing, old shirts, coats, or
pants were never merely thrown away. First we cut off all the
buttons and classified them for future use. Well-worn blue work
shirts were always used for towels. During hunting season my
brother and I and a school pal sometimes made rather unusual
use of worn-out long underwear. To make ourselves less con­spicuous
while trying to track down a fox or wolf in the snow-covered
cornfields, sloughs, or timberland, we wore this under­wear
over our regular clothing. It was much cheaper than buying
white union-alls as d i d the more professional hunters.
Another frugal approach pertained to the use of old nails.
Whenever an old building or wooden fence was torn down, all
the nails were retrieved by use of hammer and bar and placed in
a certain keg. Then on stormy days when we couldn't work out­side,
one of our jobs was to straighten these nails on an anvil in
our barn. After straightening them, we sorted and placed the
nails in kegs for future use.
We would never think of "wasting" money on garden spray to
control the bugs on the potato plants. Instead, each summer we
would merely walk up and down the long rows pinching the
bugs with our fingers—simple and effective. When clusters of
eggs were found under any leaves, they were squashed in the
same manner.
To be sure, these were often lean years, times of "skin and
scrape" as my sister once referred to those days. And these were
not idle words. If a horse or cow should die, we would retrieve
the hide for sale and bury the carcass out in a field. My notes
show in the winter of 1930 one of our cows could not deliver its
calf, so it died. The cowhide was shipped to Sears & Roebuck.
What a lot of work, much of it unpleasant, for a grand total of
$1.63.
We did have a rather simple way to judge how lean any partic­ular
year happened to be. As we travelled to or from our farm into
our little town, where the road paralleled the Burlington
Railroad, we checked any speeding empty freight train zipping
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by to see how many freeloaders there were aboard. If there were
many, we were pretty sure there was much unemployment. So,
in a way, the number of heads we saw popping up and down in
empty coal cars or peering from empty freight cars told us just
how lean times actually were.
On winter nights when the temperature fell to zero or there­abouts,
we usually made sure all our livestock received some
protection by being closed in the barn overnight. Often this re­sulted
in a rather stuffy atmosphere. An article relating to such a
situation appeared at about that time in a well-known farm
paper. A certain farmer in Illinois was quoted as saying how
great it was to go out into such a barn on a cold winter morning
and breathe the "enriched" air. As I recall, this farmer said such
air was much more valuable than regular air since it had some
"substance" as he put it!
One cold January day our local veterinarian was asked to come
out from town to treat two sick horses. The charge was only 400
for each horse!
Each spring we always raised chickens. They were every­where.
In the summertime the hens would lay their eggs in
many different places. In the large barn there were a number of
well-secluded spots. Any infertile eggs, often found in hot
weather months, were not wasted. Pa broke them into some
wood ashes in a hog trough and then stirred them. Apparently
the hogs like this combination of salty wood ashes and highly
sulfurous eggs.
Another item not wasted on our farm was corncobs. They can
accumulate pretty fast in any lot where hogs are fed ear corn. At
least in the dry season my father again prepared a special deli­cacy
for his pigs. We would rake the cobs into a pile, set fire to
them, and then sprinkle them with water when they were at their
brightest glow. This produced crisp pieces of charcoal, which
when sprinkled with salt was something the hogs like to snack
on. Although I doubt either of these two snacks contributed sig­nificantly
to my father's success as a pork producer, he was one
of the best hog raisers of his day. To be sure, he operated on a
small scale, compared with most farmers.
Each spring to increase our chicken flock, we let a few hens sit
on a dozen eggs for the necessary three weeks to hatch them.
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N e l s O b e r g , a r o u n d 1 9 2 2 .
Other biddies, also family-minded, were inclined to sit in their
empty nests for weeks before becoming career-minded again
and getting back to laying daily eggs. My father, not to be out­done,
devised an unusual solution. He put these hens in a large
covered barrel in the shade of our big Maple tree for a day or two.
Simple enough, but the barrel contained a few inches of water!
Such a treatment of required "standing" apparently speeded up
by several weeks nature's process of forgetting about "sitting"
and getting back into egg production.
A funnier experience related to our milk cows. On one sum­mer
day we picked wild blackberries out in one of the large
pastures. The first several large pails of berries we placed in the
shade of some bushes while we continued picking in other parts
of the pasture. Our herd of cattle discovered the berries and
apparently enjoyed eating them. That evening on milking the
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cows, we had "purple" milk. Perhaps this was the original
"Purple C o w " minus the ice cream. Apparently, the deep purple
dye in the ripe w i l d blackberries is not destroyed in the bovine
intestinal tract.
In those days we had no cream separator and the word "pas­teurization"
was unknown. We handled milk simply. After milk­ing
our few cows we cooled the milk in a water well. It was then
strained into crocks on a basement table, the cream allowed to
rise, skimmed off and saved until enough was available for
churning in the upright hand churn. The table with the crocks
hung from the ceiling, thus no mouse could crawl up any table
leg and accidentally fall into a crock and do a little impromptu
churning.
The milk we drank was relatively rich. That we became ac­customed
to drinking pretty rich milk was evidenced later dur­ing
my first year in college at Illinois Wesleyan. One day be­tween
classes, I stopped at a small serve-yourself eating place,
and had a roll and a bottle of milk to drink. When it came time to
pay for my refreshments, I learned I had drunk a pint bottle of
cream and had not noted the difference!
I might add another college incident of later years where for­tification
with such a bottle of cream might have served very
well. This actually happened the day after college was over
when I was hitchhiking the 100 miles back to the farm. I had two
large boxes, one for all my clothes and one for my books, each
well tied with rope. As I trudged along the road and in and out of
different cars, I thought the box of books was awfully heavy, but
aren't they always? Then, sometime during that summer, when I
finally unpacked my school things including the box of books,
what should I find? Two heavy iron discs! Someone in our col­lege
rooming house had taken them from a gym and slipped
them into my box. So apparently we had practical jokers in that
day, too.
When it came to farm tools, in some respects we were pretty
well equipped. For one thing, we had quite a variety of forks.
There was the large four-time straw fork of about 18" width, and
the regular three-pronged pitchfork for handling hay and
"pitching" bundles of grain at threshing time. Then there was
the manure fork with closely parallel tines and finally the strong
wide-tined potato fork for digging up potatoes in the garden.
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As for the pitchfork, on certain occasions my father used it for
quite a different purpose. The few cows we kept d id not warrant
keeping a male sire. They can be very difficult to handle. When
one of our cows came into heat, we would merely lead her to a
neighbor's b u l l , sometimes a mile or more away. When the serv­icing
was over and we were ready to lead our bossy away, my
father would make it a point to sneak up with his fork behind the
bull and give h im a few quick firm scratches on the rump. With
such an unexpected reward, the bull would never fail to retreat
in haste to his own herd. He would not be very anxious to chal­lenge
any man holding anything resembling a pitchfork.
For several years, we had a few "two teater" cows. They were
difficult to milk—by hand—because the teats were so large and
cone-shaped. My father kept them anyhow through several gen­erations
since they always produced good beef-type offspring.
In all my farm experience I never heard of other two-spigot milk
cows.
Several times, while out in one of our apple orchards in early
summer, I noted that a pig, perhaps in the thirty to fifty lb. range,
would be suckling a cow. This would happen when a cow's
udder was so full of milk that it could not totally contain it. Of
course, a hog with its good nose would soon locate any source of
fresh milk. Not only the receiver, but the donor profited since it
brought some relief to the cow's extended udder.
I just referred to our orchards. That was one area in which my
father excelled, growing fruit such as peaches, pears, Concord
grapes and apples. The better apple varieties were Ben Davis,
Wealthy, Wagner, Delicious, K i n g David, Jonathan, Fall Pippins
and Northwestern Greenings. We had two very hilly orchards on
which one year he produced 125—150 bushels. To be sure,
apples were often a major part of our diet. Before each noon-day
meal (dinner) we were all expected to go down into our fruit
cellar, sit on crates or stools and peel and eat our fill of apples.
(The peelings and cores were always saved for the hogs.) We
were expected to eat those first which were just starting to spoil
or rot. So sometimes it seemed all winter long we never did catch
up with the good ones!
Our daily farm life was not necessarily routine. Witness my
brother's notes for a day in March 1924. He and I "went over to
Sheffield (Illinois) to get our teeth fixed, started out to walk, but
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caught rides most of the way. On the same day we cut the horns
off four steers!" That was a little variety—hitchhiking to a dentist
about six miles away in a neighboring town in the A . M . , and
"manicuring" some steers in the P . M . E v e n when corralled in a
stanchion a two- to three-year-old steer can make it quite chal­lenging
for anyone trying to saw off his horns. Today, the simple
use of a couple dabs of caustic on a newly born calf's head fore­stalls
any horn development—a much more humane treatment.
As with other young farm boys of that day, we sometimes
dreamed of running away from home. We had no electricity, not
even a radio, and it was long before T.V. Not only was the work
often dull, but the long, still evenings—hot and humid in sum­mer
and cold and crisp in winter—often caused us to dream of
other places. We could hear trains passing ever so frequently on
three different railroads, but especially on the Burlington only
about a mile and a half away. With the eerie, haunting, melan­choly
whistles fading into the distance, the trains seemed to be
calling us and p u l l i n g us to faraway places.
One winter day my brother struck out for two cities, not more
than fifty miles away. It was during a depression and he had no
luck at all in finding any work. He had taken along some butter he
had made i n our churn. He tried to sell it in a dozen stores in
Galesburg and in half as many in Rock Island. No luck any­where.
So my brother, a rather saddened and even poorer per­son,
brought it back home. The total trip had cost him $6.25
which covered two nights' lodging and the rail fare. No doubt my
father was somewhat relieved to not be left alone since my sister
had already left home for a city job, and I was away at school.
As would be expected, trapping w i l d animals was pretty com­mon
in that day. Each winter we trapped rabbits. Our notes show
that over a period of ten winters my brother and I caught 454
rabbits. We ate all of them. With the weather dropping as low as
minus 26°F, refrigeration was cheap. We also ate squirrels,
which we hunted in fall and winter with our 22-Special rifle out
in the oak timber. Compared to their big-city cousins, these local
squirrels made excellent eating when fried. They lived on a
nutritious diet of acorns, walnuts, butternuts, hickory nuts, and,
of course, corn from any nearby field.
Year in and year out, however, meat at our table meant fried
bacon. It was purchased ever so often at our local butcher in slab
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form already salted and smoke cured. And when cooled and
allowed to thicken the lard thus rendered in our big heavy iron
skillet was an excellent flavored spread for any dark bread, for
frying potatoes, and so forth. We never wasted a bit of this ample
supply, nor d i d we convert it into soap.
One winter day my sister had baked some of her wonderful rye
bread, and when eaten with some of our bacon spread it tasted so
good we felt compelled to share such a treat with someone else.
So an extra sandwich was made, put in a large envelope, carried
a half mile through the snow to our mail box, and sent to an uncle
up in North Dakota! I do not recall the reply but trust our gesture
was welcomed.
In winter we usually d i d some " f u r " trapping to earn a little
money. The pelts—skunk, muskrat, or raccoon—were usually
shipped to Funsten Bros., St. Louis. Skunk pelts were judged
according to the amount of white area on head and back; and the
grades were black, short-stripe, narrow-stripe and broad-stripe,
in decreasing value. A skunk pelt would usually bring two to
three dollars, but once a broad-stripe brought only 450.
In the summertime, we usually battled ground hogs, or wood-chucks,
as they are also called. They were especially bad in
hayfields. They tended to dig fairly large holes in the ground,
which more than once led a horse to a broken leg. Our notes
show that one summer my brother and I trapped forty-seven
woodchucks. The local bounty on each was 250. One had to save
merely that part of the scalp with the ears. The animals them­selves
were chopped up on a block of wood, using a heavy
wide-blade hatchet. This chopped "chuck" made great feed for
our hens.
Late one summer when an uncle was visiting us he tried a
different chuck disposal procedure. The one we caught was a
really big one. No doubt it was an " o l d he one," to use a fairly
common farm boy expression. My father had gone to town so my
uncle decided to bury the animal in the cornfield back of the
barn. Somehow my father learned of this on his return home. He
demanded that the chuck be retrieved and be put through our
"meat chopper" and thus be converted to feed for our hens!
To help keep part of our house warm during the long winter
months, Pa expected my brother and me to put in some time
sawing wood each evening before dinner. We had crosscut saws,
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bucksaws, and ripsaws. There were always piles of uncut wood
stacked near our house. Pa would not think of buying coal. So the
screech-screech of a bucksaw cutting through a piece of hard,
dried hedge (Osage orange) was a common serenade just before
supper time on many a dark, cold evening. The wood warmed us
twice—when we cut it and when we burned it. We never knew of
or needed sleeping pills!
Well do I remember the rather large kitchen, always with an
uneven linoleum floor covering. It really served as a living room,
too, and was the only part of the house we tried to keep reason­ably
warm. There were two stoves, the horizontal heating one,
and a cook stove, with a large adjacent box kept full of wood. The
ashes from both stoves were saved and spread out in our garden.
Two small kerosene lamps, one on the kitchen table and the
other a reflector on the wall, did not provide much inducement
for evening reading. Our drinking water we fetched in a bucket
from a large outside cistern where we collected the rain water
from our tin roof.
Pa did not do much reading. Naturally he subscribed to the
S v e n s k a T r i b u n e n N y h e t e r . Like other independent thinkers of
his day, he also subscribed to Henry Ford's D e a r b o r n I n d e p e n ­d
e n t and Senator R. M . LaFollette's W e e k l y , two of his favorite
magazines.
For medication in those days, say for a cut or an insect bite, we
had two choices: to apply alcohol or a solution of ordinary salt. In
any case, the more the treatment stung, the better it was sup­posed
to be. If we were not feeling well—having a belly ache,
cold or most any internal distress—the first order was always to
"drink m o r e hot water."
It might be of interest to mention a pretty sure cure that we had
for that malady which today we call "lack of regularity." At least
one could use this procedure in winter when the ground was
frozen stone hard and not covered with snow. Just hitch up a
team of horses to an empty lumber wagon and drive at a fast clip
across a rough field a few times. While holding tightly onto the
reins, you had to stand with unbended knees. It was no fun for
the horses, they did not know about the chariots of old! Makes
me wonder why no one has developed a stationary vibrating
platform to accomplish the same purpose.
182
The O b e r g f a m i l y ' s M o d e l T F o r d .
Several of my father's super-conservation ideas related to the
operation of our Model T Ford, purchased in 1920 for $715.00
shortly after World War I. It was in the family for twenty-five
years. I doubt any car ever received more care. To save the tires,
he always insisted that when the car was in the garage, each
wheel be "jacked up." A block of wood was placed under the
hub to keep the tires off the ground. It was also thus suspended
all winter long. We would never think of using the car on muddy
or snowbound roads.
My father felt that we should always try to save the car brakes.
According to his reasoning, one really need not use them at all
when driving the car into our garage. When coming home and
into our large yard, one should come in at just the right speed,
circle past the barn and corn crib, and slowly on into the garage.
Speaking of operating old-time cars, once before my father had
his own vehicle, he rode with a long-time Swedish friend in the
latter's new Model T. The friend was proudly pointing out how
fast they were going by referring to a small needle on a dash­board
gauge. Actually, we learned later this gauge was merely
registering the charging of the battery! But, it d id not matter; 15
to 20 mph or so seemed like a good speed in those days.
183
One bit of extravagance we happened to have was a real one-horse
surrey " w i t h a fringe on top." It was rarely used and was
kept well preserved back in the barn. I remember when I was
five years old, however, one night when unfortunately our fam­ily
did use it. It was during the long way home from a neighbor­ing
town that a bad rainstorm with much wind and lightning
caught up with us. It was near disaster, for one thing, since there
were no side curtains.
The dirt road was lighted intermittently by lightning rather
than the moonlight that we had counted on. The worst part of the
six-mile stretch was the so-called Markee H i l l s , both rather long
and steep, where the road was covered with coarse gravel, and
there were many small gullies. What a beating our horse took as
we charged through the night, father manipulating the reins
with his left hand and wielding the buggy whip with his right.
My mother had suggested that we try to find a place to stay
overnight in town. But P a would have none of this, he was bound
to save such an expense and to try instead to beat the storm
home. But the storm won, so to speak.
One of my father's major objectives, besides always being
thrifty, was to improve the fertility of the cultivated part of our
farm, which originally produced many cockleburs and other
weeds. In cold weather, we would circle the fields with a pitch­fork
giving heave-ho to any deposits cattle might have left too
close to the fence line.
Our fight with weeds in the corn and hayfields was a continu­ing
battle. To try to keep the weeds in any cornfield under con­trol
was a routine summer job. Most of the weeds could be
plowed out with a cultivator, but hand-pulling was a necessary
supplement. It was long before the day of chemical weed killers.
It w i l l illustrate my father's "generosity" when I state that one
hot, humid summer he offered my brother and me 250 each if we
would pull a l l the weeds in a certain cornfield (about twenty
acres)!
With a scythe, or more often a spade, we scoured the pastures
and timberland for any burdocks, yellowdock, Canada thistle,
and others. I doubt that there was any farm around us as free of
obnoxious weeds as ours became. Any spot of quack grass was
completely spaded up and every rootlet collected, dried, and
184
burned. In the heavy wooded area we checked for the white
snake root plant which can be deadly for cattle.
I shall never forget one beautiful summer day as my father and
I were coming homeward across a red clover hayfield in full
blossom. No one grew better clover crops than d id my father. We
spotted a lone buckhorn plant. The seeds would soon ripen if the
plant was merely cut and allowed to dry out. After hesitating a
few moments, my father laid down the tools he happened to be
carrying. He snipped off the nearly ripe buckhorn seed, put
them in his mouth, chewed them well, spit them out and we
were on our way again.
One reason we had such good clover crops was perhaps due to
the use of limestone. Legumes need an alkaline soil. My father
did not buy limestone in town where it was usually brought in
via rail for users to haul to their farms. By chance he learned that
the soil in one h i l l out i n our field tested about 25% limestone. So
we scraped off the top soil. Then with our team of horses, we
hauled hundreds of loads—975 over a five-year period—of this
lime-rich soil and spread it over the other fields. It seemed like a
never ending and most boring job. We both loaded and spread
the soil using a spade or shovel.
To be sure, as I have written these pages, a number of other
equally interesting incidents also came to mind, but perhaps
enough is enough. I might add that after working hard for years
to improve our farm, my father quit. He was seventy and said he
was tired. He sold out in 1941, a bad depression year, just before
World War II. Sadly, he received not much more per acre for our
land than he had paid about forty years earlier. M y brother who
had stayed on the farm since finishing the country grade school
passed away the following year (1942).
So ends this story about the experience of a Swedish immi­grant
and his family on a small farm in northern Illinois during
the first part of the twentieth century. He was an unforgettable,
well-meaning man with an unbending insistence for practicing
frugality at all times.
185

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T H E F A R M L I F E O F A S W E D I S H IMMIGRANT
I N ILLINOIS
C I R C A 1900-1925
E L M E R B . O B E RG
" S k r i v när d u får a r b e t e " (write when you find work) was the
usual final request that any young man heard from his folks as he
would leave his Scandinavian homeland for the United States.
This is what my father, Nels Oberg, heard when in 1890 at the
age of eighteen he left his home in Dalby, Sweden. He was a
healthy young man already used to hard work in the fields.
During my father's first ten years in this country and prior to
his marriage, he worked on various farms in north central I l l i ­nois.
Each fall when the local harvest work slacked off he went
several hundred miles up to the Dakotas to continue field work
there. Notwithstanding his desire to save money in any way he
could, my father d i d not bum a train ride by climbing into an
empty freight or coal car. That method was too dangerous since it
presented the hazard of getting robbed or mugged by other
hitchhikers. Instead, he rode u n d e r a car! He never talked to his
family about these harrowing experiences. At one time, how­ever,
he had confided to a friend that the most frightening part of
any such trip was going over a wide river at night. He must have
been referring to the Mississippi.
Many years later I learned, but not from my father, that with
the aid of a piece of board this fearless Viking somehow an­chored
himself under a car in a half-sitting position with head
bent forward but facing the rear of the train, so that if a foot fell
down it would not necessarily mean a broken leg. The deafen­ing,
grinding noise of the big clumsy wheels, jumping and jolt­ing
at every joint of the rails, and the flying coal soot must have
been unforgettable. A l l the iron horses were fed with coal in
those days.
There was no direct train route between north central Illinois
and the Dakotas, so it would have meant taking several different
trains to make the trip. H ow my father managed to pick the right
trains and get "aboard" at the right time is not easy to imagine.
168
Riding as he did, one can be sure Pa could not get on, that is
under, after the train started rolling out of a city freight yard.
How I wish I had asked h im about those daring trips.
In some notes I find that on one occasion during his years as a
farm hand Pa went back to Sweden for a visit and apparently a
high point of the trip was a speech he made in the local grade
school, the only one he ever attended. No doubt he extolled the
virtues of " d e t n y a l a n d e t , " it being a great place to find work.
You can be sure he never dreamed that about seventy years later
one of his own family, a granddaughter, would also go to Sweden
for a school visit, i n her case to attend a summer term at Uppsala
University.
That my father had some problems with English spelling is
quite evident from some of his early expense records. Thus in
1899 when he started out on his own, renting a farm, witness
such entries as:
Other rather well-defined expenses were "toot pulled $1.00,
cut the bull $0.50!"
After renting for seven years he bought a smaller farm north­east
of Neponset (Bureau County), close to where he had been
working when he first came over from Sweden. The house on
this small farm was old and poorly constructed, its porosity
being especially evident in wintertime. It was on this relatively
poor farm that I was born and raised. When Pa bought the
ninety-odd acres, the farm was in very bad shape. There were
many gullies in the fields, the soil was poor, and weeds were the
most abundant crop. About two-thirds of the farm was in timber
and pasture land, beautiful in a sense, but not productive.
My father inherited exceptionally good health, but dear
mother, who had also come from Sweden, passed away at the age
of thirty-five when I was only eight years old. With her passing
only English, or broken English, was spoken in our home. It
might be mentioned that Pa never did master the pronunciation
of the very common pair of English consonants t h . With him it
was always I tink, tank you, dis and dat, dem and dos, nort and
sout, and so fort!
Without a mother, my ten-year-old brother Edwin, my four-turkey
gablor
dussin skrus
caddie whip
boor pig
$2.00 5 turkish
.05 muskiter nets
2.00 skupshuffel
10.00
$10.00
.45
.35
169
Nels and Johanna ( B e n g s t o n ) O b e r g and t h e i r c h i l d r e n 1 . t o
r, E d w i n , E l l e n , and E l m e r , 1 9 1 2.
teen-year-old sister E l l e n , and I at eight years, under my father's
strict discipline, carried on as best we could. My father's de­mand
for strict obedience no doubt reflected his upbringing in
Sweden, his father having been a career army man. I recall one
day our country school teacher asked my brother and me, "Why
are you two always so serious?"
My sister dropped out of school to do the necessary work at
home. My brother and I continued going to the one-room
country school about two-and-a-half miles away. One year
only three students attended. Besides the young teacher, there
was another farm boy plus my brother and me. Today there is no
trace of the school; it is all part of a large cornfield.
170
In winter our walk to and from the country school was fre­quently
a rather bitter experience. At recess we usually had a
snowball game i f the snow had melted enough to pack well. One
winter recess period I remember well. We were all playing and
running out in the large yard. Suddenly I felt something funny in
my tight fitting cap. Sure enough, a mouse had found a good
place to snooze under the furry ear flapper as my cap had hung in
the cold hallway of the school.
Although the temperature was often low, there were times
when some tempers were not. I recall one young man who
seemed to delight in annoying the teacher. One day as we were
coming in from the recess period, he decided not to get into line
and march into the room with the rest of us. Our teacher lost
control and flung a three-foot stove poker at the boy. Luckily for
all of us no one was hurt. Such an iron poker was used to stir up
the clinkers in the b i g stove.
Later, when I attended high school in town, I was spared some
long cold walks on blizzard-like days by staying in town over­night.
I was able to rent a room which included breakfast, all for
250!
As kids we were somewhat used to being put in place every
now and then. Most of the people of the community were of En­glish
extraction and I guess Swedes were considered to be a m i -
S c o t t ' s S c h o o l , D i s t r i c t N o . 1 5 4 .
171
nority. For example, one Sunday morning two well-known local
cattle buyers came to our farm to look at some of my father's
steers. While at our place one of these men noticed a strange boy,
a visiting blond cousin, a few years younger than I, and the man
commented, "Another d a m n Swede." To be sure, it was not too
uncommon for any of us kids to be greeted as a "Swede." This
Sunday morning encounter, however, was the first time that my
classification or k i n d of Swede had been so clearly delineated.
In our whole township there were no more than four or five
Scandinavian families. One such neighboring family moved out
to Iowa, which at that time (1914) was like a new frontier for
many farmers. Apparently hog production was to continue there,
as their little girl wrote to us on a penny postcard early one
spring, "Papa bought a he p i g . " That was all there was on the
card.
It could be inserted here that for one very brief moment in
history there just happened to be a lot of Swedes in our little
town of Neponset. That would have been in 1846 when a group
of Swedish emigrants came via Chicago westward through our
town and on through Kewanee in order to found Bishop H i l l.
The place was named for Biskopskulla, Sweden, birthplace of
Erik Jansson. Bishop H i l l was about fifteen miles south and west
of our farm. This communistic colony or "Utopia on the Prairie,"
as it was called, survived as such for only about fifteen years.
On the lighter side Swedes like most ethnic groups were fre­quently
the butt of many a joke. There was one about a bounty
which was offered by the city of Chicago for finding any Iowa
Swede within its city limits!
As far as other ethnic groups in our home town were con­cerned,
we always had some Belgian neighbors. We worked
with them each harvest, that is, at threshing time. I never
learned much of their language, but I could, even today, curse a
team of horses pretty authentically in Flemish.
That horses do have occasional need for some knowledge of
bilingual language was well demonstrated by an incident in our
barnyard one drowsy summer day. For a brief time that summer
we had a hired man who had just come over from the Old
Country and probably knew not a single word of English. He
would have definitely been labeled a "green Swede." My
brother and I had just helped him hitch up a team of horses to a
wagon in which the newcomer was to drive out to a field. After
172
jumping up into the wagon the man gave his strong Swedish
command. The horses did not move a step but perked up their
heads in total bewilderment. Although this happened over three
score years ago, I can still see them standing there with all ears
pointing in unison to the rear as i f to ask, " W h a t was that?" They
were well used to respond to " G i d d o p " and "Whoa," but not
this. Whenever this man d i d get the team on their way it was
probably as much from fright as anything else. Perhaps he would
have had better luck in any involvement with our cows since all
of them d i d have Swedish names!
One more brief incident relating to this non-initiated new­comer
from S v e r i g e comes to mind. At one noon-day dinner my
sister happened to place a glass of jelly on the crowded kitchen
table rather close to this man's plate. He ate the whole tumbler of
jelly himself!
In line with my father's exceptionally thrifty practices, his
general policy was to try to "get along without" whatever it
might be. Waste was unheard of. Our Dutch Cleanser can had
only one hole punched i n it! It was save, save, save, but we did
not have much to save. I doubt any Scotsman was ever more
frugal than my father.
My father d i d not drink or smoke. A nip of whiskey (brännvin)
once in a while in winter was, of course, totally for medicinal
purposes! If anyone gave him a cigar, he would lay it on top of
our wood burning cook stove so that the pleasant aroma could
permeate into the whole house for a day or so. He would never
buy a cigar for himself. On Sundays he gave each of us a penny
for the Sunday school collection plate.
One day my father bought twenty loaves of old, stale white
bread at a small grocery in town for five cents a loaf. We ate it all.
Ice cream he would not eat—too sweet, not good for anyone.
Raw eggs were O.K. He could gulp down one or two with ease.
As a young man, he had worked for a farmer whose meals were
"on the slim side." He would frequently compensate by gulping
down raw eggs out in the barn.
One of Pa's favorite winter dishes was s i l l (herring). It was the
KKKK brand ordered once each year in ten or twenty lb. wooden
pails from Montgomery Ward & Co. in Chicago.
A 250 haircut for any of us was unthought of. Instead, we took
turns cutting each other's hair. The reading glasses my father
173
used were purchased at a "100" store in Kewanee, a neighboring
town. In those days such a store really sold items at that price.
As for dress, my father had little variety. In summer it was blue
shirt, straw hat, and tan trousers with suspenders. He never
wore a belt in his lifetime. In the cold of winter he wore a cap
with ear flappers, sweater, Mackinaw coat, leggings, and over­shoes.
Often on the subzero days short icicles would hang from
his mustache! With his stocky build, he always looked like a
farmer—and he was proud of it. Pa was a man of the soil.
Apparently my father was not the only one in our family who
was easily recognized as a "farmer." One summer day I had
some errand at the local stockyards in our small town. I walked
past another boy sitting on the high board stockyard fence. He
was two years my senior and lived in town. He called out to me,
" H i ya, farmer." I was so puzzled as to how he knew I was a
farmer, or how he could appraise my status or occupation so
quickly. I did not realize at the time that wearing a straw hat,
blue shirt, and blue overalls was a complete giveaway.
Our home could scarcely be called a happy one. I do recall,
however, that once in a great while my father would sing a few
lines from " D u g a m l a , d u f r i a " [Thou old, thou free (the Swed­ish
national anthem)]. And we enjoyed hearing the Scandinavian
Bell Ringers when they came to Kewanee. Later we ordered
their records from Wallin's Music Shop in Chicago. Also some­time
in the 1920s we went to Galva to see and hear Olle i
Skratthult and his group. Their entire program was in Swedish.
Another high point for my brother and me was on a summer
Sunday morning i n 1926 seeing and hearing the Crown Prince
and Princess of Sweden at Augustana College in Rock Island
about fifty miles from home. We were impressed by his speaking
in both English and Swedish to about 3,000 people. On the same
afternoon we heard Swedish-born Senator Magnus Johnson of
Minnesota speak at a rally in nearby Moline. We could relate to
him immediately, since a picture of the Senator helping with the
haying operation on his Minnesota farm had just appeared in a
local paper. It raised our spirits since we figured this senator
knew firsthand something about the back-breaking type of work
we sweated over on our farm every summer.
The only place we bought shoes in those days was from Mont­gomery
Wards via their thick annual catalog. In ordering them,
174
the main concern was always to order a size that was large
enough so we could wear them out before we outgrew them. My
father's shoes had such a spread that it was really difficult for
him to negotiate the three little floor pedals in our 1920 Ford
touring car.
In line with our policy of wasting nothing, old shirts, coats, or
pants were never merely thrown away. First we cut off all the
buttons and classified them for future use. Well-worn blue work
shirts were always used for towels. During hunting season my
brother and I and a school pal sometimes made rather unusual
use of worn-out long underwear. To make ourselves less con­spicuous
while trying to track down a fox or wolf in the snow-covered
cornfields, sloughs, or timberland, we wore this under­wear
over our regular clothing. It was much cheaper than buying
white union-alls as d i d the more professional hunters.
Another frugal approach pertained to the use of old nails.
Whenever an old building or wooden fence was torn down, all
the nails were retrieved by use of hammer and bar and placed in
a certain keg. Then on stormy days when we couldn't work out­side,
one of our jobs was to straighten these nails on an anvil in
our barn. After straightening them, we sorted and placed the
nails in kegs for future use.
We would never think of "wasting" money on garden spray to
control the bugs on the potato plants. Instead, each summer we
would merely walk up and down the long rows pinching the
bugs with our fingers—simple and effective. When clusters of
eggs were found under any leaves, they were squashed in the
same manner.
To be sure, these were often lean years, times of "skin and
scrape" as my sister once referred to those days. And these were
not idle words. If a horse or cow should die, we would retrieve
the hide for sale and bury the carcass out in a field. My notes
show in the winter of 1930 one of our cows could not deliver its
calf, so it died. The cowhide was shipped to Sears & Roebuck.
What a lot of work, much of it unpleasant, for a grand total of
$1.63.
We did have a rather simple way to judge how lean any partic­ular
year happened to be. As we travelled to or from our farm into
our little town, where the road paralleled the Burlington
Railroad, we checked any speeding empty freight train zipping
175
by to see how many freeloaders there were aboard. If there were
many, we were pretty sure there was much unemployment. So,
in a way, the number of heads we saw popping up and down in
empty coal cars or peering from empty freight cars told us just
how lean times actually were.
On winter nights when the temperature fell to zero or there­abouts,
we usually made sure all our livestock received some
protection by being closed in the barn overnight. Often this re­sulted
in a rather stuffy atmosphere. An article relating to such a
situation appeared at about that time in a well-known farm
paper. A certain farmer in Illinois was quoted as saying how
great it was to go out into such a barn on a cold winter morning
and breathe the "enriched" air. As I recall, this farmer said such
air was much more valuable than regular air since it had some
"substance" as he put it!
One cold January day our local veterinarian was asked to come
out from town to treat two sick horses. The charge was only 400
for each horse!
Each spring we always raised chickens. They were every­where.
In the summertime the hens would lay their eggs in
many different places. In the large barn there were a number of
well-secluded spots. Any infertile eggs, often found in hot
weather months, were not wasted. Pa broke them into some
wood ashes in a hog trough and then stirred them. Apparently
the hogs like this combination of salty wood ashes and highly
sulfurous eggs.
Another item not wasted on our farm was corncobs. They can
accumulate pretty fast in any lot where hogs are fed ear corn. At
least in the dry season my father again prepared a special deli­cacy
for his pigs. We would rake the cobs into a pile, set fire to
them, and then sprinkle them with water when they were at their
brightest glow. This produced crisp pieces of charcoal, which
when sprinkled with salt was something the hogs like to snack
on. Although I doubt either of these two snacks contributed sig­nificantly
to my father's success as a pork producer, he was one
of the best hog raisers of his day. To be sure, he operated on a
small scale, compared with most farmers.
Each spring to increase our chicken flock, we let a few hens sit
on a dozen eggs for the necessary three weeks to hatch them.
176
N e l s O b e r g , a r o u n d 1 9 2 2 .
Other biddies, also family-minded, were inclined to sit in their
empty nests for weeks before becoming career-minded again
and getting back to laying daily eggs. My father, not to be out­done,
devised an unusual solution. He put these hens in a large
covered barrel in the shade of our big Maple tree for a day or two.
Simple enough, but the barrel contained a few inches of water!
Such a treatment of required "standing" apparently speeded up
by several weeks nature's process of forgetting about "sitting"
and getting back into egg production.
A funnier experience related to our milk cows. On one sum­mer
day we picked wild blackberries out in one of the large
pastures. The first several large pails of berries we placed in the
shade of some bushes while we continued picking in other parts
of the pasture. Our herd of cattle discovered the berries and
apparently enjoyed eating them. That evening on milking the
177
cows, we had "purple" milk. Perhaps this was the original
"Purple C o w " minus the ice cream. Apparently, the deep purple
dye in the ripe w i l d blackberries is not destroyed in the bovine
intestinal tract.
In those days we had no cream separator and the word "pas­teurization"
was unknown. We handled milk simply. After milk­ing
our few cows we cooled the milk in a water well. It was then
strained into crocks on a basement table, the cream allowed to
rise, skimmed off and saved until enough was available for
churning in the upright hand churn. The table with the crocks
hung from the ceiling, thus no mouse could crawl up any table
leg and accidentally fall into a crock and do a little impromptu
churning.
The milk we drank was relatively rich. That we became ac­customed
to drinking pretty rich milk was evidenced later dur­ing
my first year in college at Illinois Wesleyan. One day be­tween
classes, I stopped at a small serve-yourself eating place,
and had a roll and a bottle of milk to drink. When it came time to
pay for my refreshments, I learned I had drunk a pint bottle of
cream and had not noted the difference!
I might add another college incident of later years where for­tification
with such a bottle of cream might have served very
well. This actually happened the day after college was over
when I was hitchhiking the 100 miles back to the farm. I had two
large boxes, one for all my clothes and one for my books, each
well tied with rope. As I trudged along the road and in and out of
different cars, I thought the box of books was awfully heavy, but
aren't they always? Then, sometime during that summer, when I
finally unpacked my school things including the box of books,
what should I find? Two heavy iron discs! Someone in our col­lege
rooming house had taken them from a gym and slipped
them into my box. So apparently we had practical jokers in that
day, too.
When it came to farm tools, in some respects we were pretty
well equipped. For one thing, we had quite a variety of forks.
There was the large four-time straw fork of about 18" width, and
the regular three-pronged pitchfork for handling hay and
"pitching" bundles of grain at threshing time. Then there was
the manure fork with closely parallel tines and finally the strong
wide-tined potato fork for digging up potatoes in the garden.
178
As for the pitchfork, on certain occasions my father used it for
quite a different purpose. The few cows we kept d id not warrant
keeping a male sire. They can be very difficult to handle. When
one of our cows came into heat, we would merely lead her to a
neighbor's b u l l , sometimes a mile or more away. When the serv­icing
was over and we were ready to lead our bossy away, my
father would make it a point to sneak up with his fork behind the
bull and give h im a few quick firm scratches on the rump. With
such an unexpected reward, the bull would never fail to retreat
in haste to his own herd. He would not be very anxious to chal­lenge
any man holding anything resembling a pitchfork.
For several years, we had a few "two teater" cows. They were
difficult to milk—by hand—because the teats were so large and
cone-shaped. My father kept them anyhow through several gen­erations
since they always produced good beef-type offspring.
In all my farm experience I never heard of other two-spigot milk
cows.
Several times, while out in one of our apple orchards in early
summer, I noted that a pig, perhaps in the thirty to fifty lb. range,
would be suckling a cow. This would happen when a cow's
udder was so full of milk that it could not totally contain it. Of
course, a hog with its good nose would soon locate any source of
fresh milk. Not only the receiver, but the donor profited since it
brought some relief to the cow's extended udder.
I just referred to our orchards. That was one area in which my
father excelled, growing fruit such as peaches, pears, Concord
grapes and apples. The better apple varieties were Ben Davis,
Wealthy, Wagner, Delicious, K i n g David, Jonathan, Fall Pippins
and Northwestern Greenings. We had two very hilly orchards on
which one year he produced 125—150 bushels. To be sure,
apples were often a major part of our diet. Before each noon-day
meal (dinner) we were all expected to go down into our fruit
cellar, sit on crates or stools and peel and eat our fill of apples.
(The peelings and cores were always saved for the hogs.) We
were expected to eat those first which were just starting to spoil
or rot. So sometimes it seemed all winter long we never did catch
up with the good ones!
Our daily farm life was not necessarily routine. Witness my
brother's notes for a day in March 1924. He and I "went over to
Sheffield (Illinois) to get our teeth fixed, started out to walk, but
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caught rides most of the way. On the same day we cut the horns
off four steers!" That was a little variety—hitchhiking to a dentist
about six miles away in a neighboring town in the A . M . , and
"manicuring" some steers in the P . M . E v e n when corralled in a
stanchion a two- to three-year-old steer can make it quite chal­lenging
for anyone trying to saw off his horns. Today, the simple
use of a couple dabs of caustic on a newly born calf's head fore­stalls
any horn development—a much more humane treatment.
As with other young farm boys of that day, we sometimes
dreamed of running away from home. We had no electricity, not
even a radio, and it was long before T.V. Not only was the work
often dull, but the long, still evenings—hot and humid in sum­mer
and cold and crisp in winter—often caused us to dream of
other places. We could hear trains passing ever so frequently on
three different railroads, but especially on the Burlington only
about a mile and a half away. With the eerie, haunting, melan­choly
whistles fading into the distance, the trains seemed to be
calling us and p u l l i n g us to faraway places.
One winter day my brother struck out for two cities, not more
than fifty miles away. It was during a depression and he had no
luck at all in finding any work. He had taken along some butter he
had made i n our churn. He tried to sell it in a dozen stores in
Galesburg and in half as many in Rock Island. No luck any­where.
So my brother, a rather saddened and even poorer per­son,
brought it back home. The total trip had cost him $6.25
which covered two nights' lodging and the rail fare. No doubt my
father was somewhat relieved to not be left alone since my sister
had already left home for a city job, and I was away at school.
As would be expected, trapping w i l d animals was pretty com­mon
in that day. Each winter we trapped rabbits. Our notes show
that over a period of ten winters my brother and I caught 454
rabbits. We ate all of them. With the weather dropping as low as
minus 26°F, refrigeration was cheap. We also ate squirrels,
which we hunted in fall and winter with our 22-Special rifle out
in the oak timber. Compared to their big-city cousins, these local
squirrels made excellent eating when fried. They lived on a
nutritious diet of acorns, walnuts, butternuts, hickory nuts, and,
of course, corn from any nearby field.
Year in and year out, however, meat at our table meant fried
bacon. It was purchased ever so often at our local butcher in slab
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form already salted and smoke cured. And when cooled and
allowed to thicken the lard thus rendered in our big heavy iron
skillet was an excellent flavored spread for any dark bread, for
frying potatoes, and so forth. We never wasted a bit of this ample
supply, nor d i d we convert it into soap.
One winter day my sister had baked some of her wonderful rye
bread, and when eaten with some of our bacon spread it tasted so
good we felt compelled to share such a treat with someone else.
So an extra sandwich was made, put in a large envelope, carried
a half mile through the snow to our mail box, and sent to an uncle
up in North Dakota! I do not recall the reply but trust our gesture
was welcomed.
In winter we usually d i d some " f u r " trapping to earn a little
money. The pelts—skunk, muskrat, or raccoon—were usually
shipped to Funsten Bros., St. Louis. Skunk pelts were judged
according to the amount of white area on head and back; and the
grades were black, short-stripe, narrow-stripe and broad-stripe,
in decreasing value. A skunk pelt would usually bring two to
three dollars, but once a broad-stripe brought only 450.
In the summertime, we usually battled ground hogs, or wood-chucks,
as they are also called. They were especially bad in
hayfields. They tended to dig fairly large holes in the ground,
which more than once led a horse to a broken leg. Our notes
show that one summer my brother and I trapped forty-seven
woodchucks. The local bounty on each was 250. One had to save
merely that part of the scalp with the ears. The animals them­selves
were chopped up on a block of wood, using a heavy
wide-blade hatchet. This chopped "chuck" made great feed for
our hens.
Late one summer when an uncle was visiting us he tried a
different chuck disposal procedure. The one we caught was a
really big one. No doubt it was an " o l d he one," to use a fairly
common farm boy expression. My father had gone to town so my
uncle decided to bury the animal in the cornfield back of the
barn. Somehow my father learned of this on his return home. He
demanded that the chuck be retrieved and be put through our
"meat chopper" and thus be converted to feed for our hens!
To help keep part of our house warm during the long winter
months, Pa expected my brother and me to put in some time
sawing wood each evening before dinner. We had crosscut saws,
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bucksaws, and ripsaws. There were always piles of uncut wood
stacked near our house. Pa would not think of buying coal. So the
screech-screech of a bucksaw cutting through a piece of hard,
dried hedge (Osage orange) was a common serenade just before
supper time on many a dark, cold evening. The wood warmed us
twice—when we cut it and when we burned it. We never knew of
or needed sleeping pills!
Well do I remember the rather large kitchen, always with an
uneven linoleum floor covering. It really served as a living room,
too, and was the only part of the house we tried to keep reason­ably
warm. There were two stoves, the horizontal heating one,
and a cook stove, with a large adjacent box kept full of wood. The
ashes from both stoves were saved and spread out in our garden.
Two small kerosene lamps, one on the kitchen table and the
other a reflector on the wall, did not provide much inducement
for evening reading. Our drinking water we fetched in a bucket
from a large outside cistern where we collected the rain water
from our tin roof.
Pa did not do much reading. Naturally he subscribed to the
S v e n s k a T r i b u n e n N y h e t e r . Like other independent thinkers of
his day, he also subscribed to Henry Ford's D e a r b o r n I n d e p e n ­d
e n t and Senator R. M . LaFollette's W e e k l y , two of his favorite
magazines.
For medication in those days, say for a cut or an insect bite, we
had two choices: to apply alcohol or a solution of ordinary salt. In
any case, the more the treatment stung, the better it was sup­posed
to be. If we were not feeling well—having a belly ache,
cold or most any internal distress—the first order was always to
"drink m o r e hot water."
It might be of interest to mention a pretty sure cure that we had
for that malady which today we call "lack of regularity." At least
one could use this procedure in winter when the ground was
frozen stone hard and not covered with snow. Just hitch up a
team of horses to an empty lumber wagon and drive at a fast clip
across a rough field a few times. While holding tightly onto the
reins, you had to stand with unbended knees. It was no fun for
the horses, they did not know about the chariots of old! Makes
me wonder why no one has developed a stationary vibrating
platform to accomplish the same purpose.
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The O b e r g f a m i l y ' s M o d e l T F o r d .
Several of my father's super-conservation ideas related to the
operation of our Model T Ford, purchased in 1920 for $715.00
shortly after World War I. It was in the family for twenty-five
years. I doubt any car ever received more care. To save the tires,
he always insisted that when the car was in the garage, each
wheel be "jacked up." A block of wood was placed under the
hub to keep the tires off the ground. It was also thus suspended
all winter long. We would never think of using the car on muddy
or snowbound roads.
My father felt that we should always try to save the car brakes.
According to his reasoning, one really need not use them at all
when driving the car into our garage. When coming home and
into our large yard, one should come in at just the right speed,
circle past the barn and corn crib, and slowly on into the garage.
Speaking of operating old-time cars, once before my father had
his own vehicle, he rode with a long-time Swedish friend in the
latter's new Model T. The friend was proudly pointing out how
fast they were going by referring to a small needle on a dash­board
gauge. Actually, we learned later this gauge was merely
registering the charging of the battery! But, it d id not matter; 15
to 20 mph or so seemed like a good speed in those days.
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One bit of extravagance we happened to have was a real one-horse
surrey " w i t h a fringe on top." It was rarely used and was
kept well preserved back in the barn. I remember when I was
five years old, however, one night when unfortunately our fam­ily
did use it. It was during the long way home from a neighbor­ing
town that a bad rainstorm with much wind and lightning
caught up with us. It was near disaster, for one thing, since there
were no side curtains.
The dirt road was lighted intermittently by lightning rather
than the moonlight that we had counted on. The worst part of the
six-mile stretch was the so-called Markee H i l l s , both rather long
and steep, where the road was covered with coarse gravel, and
there were many small gullies. What a beating our horse took as
we charged through the night, father manipulating the reins
with his left hand and wielding the buggy whip with his right.
My mother had suggested that we try to find a place to stay
overnight in town. But P a would have none of this, he was bound
to save such an expense and to try instead to beat the storm
home. But the storm won, so to speak.
One of my father's major objectives, besides always being
thrifty, was to improve the fertility of the cultivated part of our
farm, which originally produced many cockleburs and other
weeds. In cold weather, we would circle the fields with a pitch­fork
giving heave-ho to any deposits cattle might have left too
close to the fence line.
Our fight with weeds in the corn and hayfields was a continu­ing
battle. To try to keep the weeds in any cornfield under con­trol
was a routine summer job. Most of the weeds could be
plowed out with a cultivator, but hand-pulling was a necessary
supplement. It was long before the day of chemical weed killers.
It w i l l illustrate my father's "generosity" when I state that one
hot, humid summer he offered my brother and me 250 each if we
would pull a l l the weeds in a certain cornfield (about twenty
acres)!
With a scythe, or more often a spade, we scoured the pastures
and timberland for any burdocks, yellowdock, Canada thistle,
and others. I doubt that there was any farm around us as free of
obnoxious weeds as ours became. Any spot of quack grass was
completely spaded up and every rootlet collected, dried, and
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burned. In the heavy wooded area we checked for the white
snake root plant which can be deadly for cattle.
I shall never forget one beautiful summer day as my father and
I were coming homeward across a red clover hayfield in full
blossom. No one grew better clover crops than d id my father. We
spotted a lone buckhorn plant. The seeds would soon ripen if the
plant was merely cut and allowed to dry out. After hesitating a
few moments, my father laid down the tools he happened to be
carrying. He snipped off the nearly ripe buckhorn seed, put
them in his mouth, chewed them well, spit them out and we
were on our way again.
One reason we had such good clover crops was perhaps due to
the use of limestone. Legumes need an alkaline soil. My father
did not buy limestone in town where it was usually brought in
via rail for users to haul to their farms. By chance he learned that
the soil in one h i l l out i n our field tested about 25% limestone. So
we scraped off the top soil. Then with our team of horses, we
hauled hundreds of loads—975 over a five-year period—of this
lime-rich soil and spread it over the other fields. It seemed like a
never ending and most boring job. We both loaded and spread
the soil using a spade or shovel.
To be sure, as I have written these pages, a number of other
equally interesting incidents also came to mind, but perhaps
enough is enough. I might add that after working hard for years
to improve our farm, my father quit. He was seventy and said he
was tired. He sold out in 1941, a bad depression year, just before
World War II. Sadly, he received not much more per acre for our
land than he had paid about forty years earlier. M y brother who
had stayed on the farm since finishing the country grade school
passed away the following year (1942).
So ends this story about the experience of a Swedish immi­grant
and his family on a small farm in northern Illinois during
the first part of the twentieth century. He was an unforgettable,
well-meaning man with an unbending insistence for practicing
frugality at all times.
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